Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is the director of communications for the Legatum institute and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.

Doctors' language skills are a matter of life and death

All doctors are not created equal. A great deal depends on the country where they were educated. For instance, doctors in most of the EU will have spent six years studying medicine – but in Ireland, they're only required to do four. In some countries, a medical student will "shadow" a hospital consultant, but in Italy this need only last a month (and, from my experience of Italian nepotism, these highly sought-after training posts are more likely to be handed over to the nephew of a second cousin than to the best and brightest). Nor are all medical schools of equal calibre: the department of medicine in one Indian university was rocked by a sex-for-marks scandal last year; and it is hardly reassuring to know that would-be doctors who didn't make the grade in their homeland can get into a foreign course without any problem.

I didn't need The Daily Telegraph to tell me that the NHS has legions of foreign doctors. But what is alarming is that so many are under-qualified. Even worse, EU regulations make it impossible for the NHS to test these foreign doctors in terms of their professional capabilities, let alone their command of the English language. Pretty scary, surely: there is a chain of command in most medical procedures, and if even only one link fails, catastrophe (in a hospital context a maiming, or a death) can ensue.

This is not to say that foreign doctors who come here in search of a job are lazy. The European Working Time Directive cuts short the amount of training they can receive, and this includes English language lessons. This is madness: even the most industrious foreign medic, with the best will in the world, cannot overcome poor qualifications on his own. Training in a proper context is essential – not least because it brings to light when someone has only poor English. If, upon being told to pass the scalpel, the foreign doctor hands the surgeon a bandage, then everyone knows that some language lessons are needed.

Although poor language and medical skills are most dangerous in the men and women who carry out life and death operations, they are very common among nurses and hospital cleaners too. I remember being outraged that one nurse during a long day at my mother's hospital bedside had not said a word: surely human contact is important for patients lying immobile in bed? But when I addressed her, the woman smiled inanely and nodded furiously at everything I said: she obviously didn't understand a word, and had kept shtum in order to conceal her poor English.

In too many cases, the NHS hospital is a tower of Babel instead of a haven: hardly the setting for healing.